Hums and Silence

I have an overactive mind. Just ask anyone who has had to listen to me think through literally anything, even something as mundane as to which way to get someplace. My mind jumps around all the time, and most of the time I don’t notice myself flying off the tracks.

While my ADHD allows me to find connections faster, it does not always make life easy.

However, the fact that my mind is constantly whirring along has allowed me to identify where I truly find peace, where God has intended me to be.

The Hum

Shonda Rhimes (creator of Gray's Anatomy, How to Get Away with Murder, etc) describes her working life as a sort of hum. It’s this natural little sound in the back of her mind that allows her to keep working, to keep creating the shows that millions of people watch every week and binge watch frequently on Netflix. It’s an internal motivator, one that only the person working experiences.

I believe that the hum in our hearts as we work is God’s little reminder that we are working where we are meant to work.

With a mind that moves at a mile a minute, the hum is something I woud never expect to hear. 

But I did.

It was on a Saturday morning in my lab. I was working on a simple bacterial transformation. None of the “platypups” were around, and I was just reading a paper that had been sent to me from Google Scholar Alerts. There was nothing particularly special about the moment. And yet there was something profound in the simplicity of that solitary saturday morning in the basement.

My mind was completely focused without force.

When I am working in the lab, I am often responding to the questions of my undergrads, making jokes with the other grad student, or trying to keep up with what my PI needs. I am still completley focused, but I rarely get the chance to acknowledge what is going on inside my mind.

On that morning I could finally hear the hum that moved me along in the lab.

I thought back to the times when I failed, when I questioned why I had decided to leave my comfortable place in Biochemistry and become a Biologist. For some reason, I always brought myself back to the lab, after all of the people left, and set up an experiment. 

The hum of the Holy Spirit had taken me back to my bench, settled my mind as I worked, and brought forth success in ways I could not have accomplished on my own.

I have known for a long time that God had intended for me to be a biologist. The joy I feel in the lab is something I can never truly explain. How the Holy Spirit was working through me, until that moment, had been somewhat hidden in my heart.

By partaking in my God-given vocation, I could hear the hum in my normally buzzy mind.

While the hum is truly a beautiful thing, there is a far more beautiful thing that I have experienced as a result of my ADHD.

Silence

Like I said, my mind is the ultimate marathon runner. It’s moves like Forest Gump when he was just running for months. 

While many would describe this as a burden, as an unfortunate cross to bare, I would have to disagree. See there have been so many benefits from my ability to switch focus without much effort:

I can work on multiple topics at the same time

I can be in a room and acknowledge the needs of everyone there

I can adjust quickly to most situations

My marathon mind has given me the opportunity to be a highly functioning scientist, RA, dancer, and friend. It is truly a blessing to be able to build community in a space where I am working and learning. I love to run around and perform a million tasks as I listen to the life story of the person sitting beside me. Still, it is quite exhausting, keeping up with all of the many facets of my life and the many lives around me. 

But God has given me a beautiful gift

Silence in His presence

I am not saying that God does not speak to me. While I have had times where God has been difficult to hear, this profound silence is not like that at all. Allow me to explain:

I was going to Adoration with my friends at University Catholic and Alpha Gamma Delta. For my non-Catholic readers, Adoration is where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed on the altar. God’s divine presence is fully present in the Eucharist, and that means that in Adoration my Lord and Savior is before me on the altar during Adoration.

Usually when I go to Adoration I am overwhelmed with emotion, with a specific prayer that the Holy Spirit guides me to.

But at some point during my senior year, I could not think of anything.

It didn’t always happen, but it became more and more frequent as the weeks went on. As with many people who experience silence when in prayer, I was greatly distressed. At that point in my life, I was trying to adjust to moving to Notre Dame and becoming the woman that God wanted me to be in that place. I was struggling with homesickness, with loneliness, with crushes, with confusion, and I could not seem to keep up with everything.

I was exhausted.

And in the one place I thought that my whirling mind could become more clear, there was nothing there.

Still I came, day after day, begging God to speak to me.

A week in to graduate school, I recognized why this silence was a blessing instead of a struggle. At graduate student mass, the priest was talking about how God was here for us, always present in the Eucharist. He just wanted us to come. 

“Light means love. Love means that you are not alone.” the priest quoted a friend

For my non-Catholic readers, we light a red candle wherever the Eucharist is present, so that we may find God in the Blessed Sacrament. So when the priest mentioned light meaning love, he was speaking of how wherever the Sacrament is present, love is there. We are not alone when we are in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

As the homily continued, I stared at the Tabernacle. 

Suddenly it clicked.

Silence was God’s way of telling me that I could stop.

God gave me this hyperactive mind because I am able to do many good things for others with it. I am able to do His work in the world because of my mind. Yet in His presence, all I need is Him. All I needed all this time was to simple be with my Lord.

Rest in Me he said through the silence.

God does not want us to think that we have to work to be part of His fold. We are all loved unconditionally by a good good Father, and He just wants us to let Him in.

When God sent me silence, He was telling me that I needed to stop trying so hard. I did not need to keep trying to be the best in the lab, the classroom, the gym, the world. I just had to be me, happy little Felicity who wears sparkly blue skirts, skips through the grass, and loves her undergrads a bit more than the average graduate student. 

God told my mind to stop being so critical, stop being so preoccupied by the world, so that He could let me just be me.

So many of my friends have asked me if I really do believe that my God could be in the piece of bread and a sip of wine. The mystery of it, while there have been accounts of actual human cells in the Eucharist, still seems far fetched to the world. As a scientist, I will admit that it seems insane.

But I truly do believe that my God, the God that died upon the Cross and rose on the third day, is fully present in the Eucharist.

I know it because of the hum in my heart from the Holy Spirit as I sit in the lab.

I know it because the warmth in my heart when I am among people I love.

I know it because of the profound silence in my mind when I am in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament. 

My mind has not been able to stop anywhere other than in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.

So yes, my ADHD is hard at times. Yes, I do have to get accommodations for exams and take medicine. But it allows me to give back to so many others, to love so many activities, to do so many good works. 

In the most perfect and beautiful way, my ADHD brought me closer to God

Both in the world and in His presence in the Blessed Sacrament

I pray that each of my Dear Readers find their hum and their silence.